"What's interesting is that this will become the defining point of Guild Wars outside of the no monthly subscription fee. We've made significant strides towards nailing the PvP aspect of Guild Wars. Obviously that's where our first focus was and we wanted to make sure it was right. But I think that this quest system is really going to be the thing that people are excited about. It really what differentiates us in terms of the gameplay experience from a traditional MMO because we have the ability for you to actually alter the world around you."

This kind of gameplay could be exactly what those gamers that like the social aspects of MMOs, but don't like the static nature of the worlds have been looking for. You're likely to find that Jeff Strain and the ArenaNet crew completely agree with that sentiment and that is exactly what they're hoping to find. It creates an experience that acts a lot more like an offline game than an online one. "I have always missed the fact that with a game like Baldur's Gate you could actually go change the world and if you accomplish something and came back out talking to all the NPCs, they knew you did it," says Strain. "That, to me, has been what has been missing from the traditional MMO formula and I'm really excited that we've found a way to bring that back into it!"

The one thing that we haven't discussed in relation to the dynamic quest feature are the story quests. Story is a big aspect of Guild Wars and is being kept a big separate from the dynamic questing system of the explorable areas. The story missions are more of a checkpoint system where the fiction gets driven forward and familiar characters play a larger roll. ArenaNet is keeping these areas more scripted in terms of what happens so that there is less variability in order to keep the story intact.

Those that play the Beta this weekend can look forward to getting a glimpse at the new quest system as it is incarnated in the first areas of the game at this point. Player characters have been wiped and will have to begin over at level 1 and will be able to progress up to Ascension, which is basically where the other betas had begun before the character wipe. All of the explorable areas of the Ascalon region will contain the new quest system so that players can get a good grasp from the beginning on how they work.

"I don't know if you can tell, but I'm personally excited about this feature," says Jeff happily as he continues on. "It's something that we haven't talked about before now and it's really great that we can begin to show it in the early stages and have players help us test it out. The infrastructure has been in development for quite a while, since before the WPE in October. As we push forward to shipping the game the vast majority of the time and energy of the content team is going to be adding content into that infrastructure."

Look forward to getting more info on Guild Wars in the future as it approaches release this year.